These are remarks I prepared for a panel discussion, “In Tribute to Mark von Hagen’s Contributions to Ukrainian Studies,” dedicated to the trailblazing Soviet and Ukrainian historian, my late mentor, Prof. Mark von Hagen. The discussion took place on September 20, 2024 at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. It is archived online here. (My remarks come last in the lineup, at approximately the 55 min mark).

To pull back the curtain slightly for anyone actually reading this: what follows is my draft prepared for that day, and not an exact transcript of what I actually said. Many of the sentences are longer than I would like them to be if it were a work for publication, but this mimics my flow when speaking. Italics are how I make a note to self; how I remind myself where to put the emphasis in spoken delivery. The brackets represent scripted asides that I decide to include on the spot, based mostly on time and my perception of vibes in the room.

I’m going to take my prerogative as the last speaker, and as Mark von Hagen’s former student, to speak about him personally. Or maybe more accurately, I want to speak on the entanglements of the personal, political, and scholarly in my relationship to Mark, and those same entanglements in Mark’s relationship to scholarship on Ukraine and Russia and the former Soviet Union. [This might be my way also of reacting to the idea that is so widespread in academia of scholars as semi-autonomous brains, somehow divorced from their bodies; as intellects who should always be only objective and distanced and skeptical, when I believe that our duty as scholars is to aspire to circumspection always, to be rigorous in our methods, but also to name our positions vis-a-vis our subjects of study, and also to be honest about the ways in which our very selection of objects of study is shot through with the political (and often the personal). Mark is one of the teachers who taught me this.]

First, I want to just briefly remember Mark as a body in the world. Do you remember? He towered above me at over six feet, he was lanky, handsome. In a word: intimidating. The picture of the stereotypical distinguished white male Ivy League professor. 

Do you remember his voice, though? I just listened back to an interview I conducted with him in 2005 (for my master’s thesis in ethnomusicology, on accordions and their attendant cultural/racial/gendered “baggage”) and I delighted in hearing it again. His voice was the opposite of intimidating: it was disarmingly gentle. Gentle but self-assured, conversational, and lilting.

I arrived at Barnard as a very nervous undergraduate transfer student. I was weighed down by a sense of inferiority after having attended a low-ranked public commuter university in Virginia for the first half of my college degree. Another greatly missed mentor – the late Cathy Nepomnyashchy, also a former director of the Harriman – encouraged me to reach out to Prof. von Hagen, who had by then started his research and writing on Ukraine. It took me over a year to reach out to him – how intimidating! And then when I was finally forced to do it, I discovered a person so eager for conversation, so humble in his approach yet so knowledgeable of Soviet history, that I quickly became his mentee. This was a relationship that we maintained from the end of my undergraduate degree through my first visit to his apartment (my first invitation from a fancy professor!), to my dissertation committee, into my first and second jobs as a professor, to after he’d moved to Arizona, where he organized a lecture for me, and up to his premature passing. This included a year-long post-collegiate stint as his assistant in the Ukrainian Studies initiative here at the Harriman—that year we made a very memorable (and these days, difficult to imagine as having really happened) trip to Donetsk for the international conference of Ukrainainists (МАУ), for which Mark was then serving as president. We also discovered a shared history as accordionists, and for some years, I would haul my instrument here to the 12th floor, and we would sightread old Soviet songs for the annual Harriman winter party.   

After college, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to be a scholar, and I was even less sure that I wanted to be a Ukrainianist, but I found myself in a PhD program here at Columbia, in the Music Department. Increasingly, Mark’s courageous decision to become a Ukrainianist inspired me. Why courageous? Because to choose Ukraine as a history to take seriously after it had been so dismissed and pigeonholed, was to go against the Russocentric grain of the Cold War and post-Cold War cultures of studying this region. Mark’s choice had a big effect on me. 

Having grown up in the anticommunist Ukrainian-American diaspora and then gaining exposure to the quite Russocentric “Slavic Studies” apparatus during my undergraduate degree, I got the very clear message that studying Ukraine would be a dead end – no jobs, no one cares, Russia Russia Russia, probably better to go to Brazil for fieldwork (which was actually what I first attempted). But then this eminent historian, the chair of History at Columbia, with no Ukrainian heritage connection, had chosen to study Ukraine. He chose to center it, to treat it seriously as a place and a topic. In the pages of the flagship Slavic Review journal, Mark asked the provocative, necessary, dangerous question: Does Ukraine Have a History? And I read it. And–here’s where it really feels personal, but it is equally political–for the first time in my education, I felt really seen. 

In this 1995 essay, which is now translated in Ukrainian in the beautiful new collection we are here to celebrate today, Prof. von Hagen points out that, if we look at the “political geography” of where Ukrainian history is taught, “we find virtually no recognition that Ukraine has a history” (1995, 658). This leads to the depiction of Ukrainian attempts to claim a history as “‘searching for roots,’ national advocacy or some other partisan pleading [my emphasis], and to deny the field the valorization it seeks as ‘objective history’”(659). Von Hagen frets that, since an independent post-Soviet Ukraine will need to have a history, it may be reduced to dogmas of ethno-nationalism: “Federalist, regionalist and autonomist political thought in general is likely to be one of the casualties of an overly nationalist rewriting of the past that posits a sovereign, national state as the teleological outcome of history” (666).

 Yet, despite the discontinuities of Ukrainian national history, its amorphous and shifting borders, the legacy of occupying powers’ destabilization of Ukrainian identity, and its assimilation of elites into dominant occupying powers, von Hagen lands on a hopeful prognosis for Ukrainian futurity: by rooting the search for history in cultural continuities rather than in the unbroken history of its “state and national traditions,” von Hagen comes to the powerful conclusion that Ukrainian history “can serve as a wonderful vehicle to challenge the nation-state’s conceptual hegemony and to explore some of the most contested issues of identity formation, cultural construction and maintenance, and colonial institutions and structures” (673).

How exciting a prospect, exactly the kind of project I wanted to be a part of! To paraphrase the wonderful Ukrainianist historian Mayhill Fowler, the idea that Ukraine could be “the most interesting place on earth” to study not only made it seem possible for me to choose Ukraine, but even kind of thrilling. [Based on Mark’s reading of the radical potential of Ukrainian historiography, I found (and continue to find today) grounding in works from well beyond Ukraine. For example: when I first encountered Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s highly influential book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, which puts the silencing of Haitian history into context along other historical silences and denials, I couldn’t help but see the parallels between Trouillot’s “truth claims” and the dynamics of power inherent in attempts to narrate a history of the place of my heritage, the place called Ukraine. Von Hagen and Trouillot together help me think.] 

In my first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine, I cited Mark’s “Does Ukraine Have a History?” article when justifying the foundations of the theoretical apparatus I was attempting to build, based on years of fieldwork in Ukraine. Mark emboldened me to make the following claim (with apologies for unabashedly quoting myself): that it is “the perennial underdogs of global geopolitics whose ‘nationalisms’ are depicted as threatening and suspicious rather than the stance of ennobled patriotism bequeathed to the victors of geopolitics.” When we reflect on the world after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the fragility of state sovereignty around the world, and the extremely late but urgent revaluation of Russia’s imperial identity then and now, the template set by Mark in 1995 remains, to me, foundational. As I draft the manuscript for my third book now, I am again building from Mark’s contributions to what is known as the “imperial turn” in Soviet historiography, especially from the vantage of Ukraine. I would have so much less to build upon without his work.

There is so much more to say about the contributions Mark von Hagen has made to the field of Ukrainian studies. His (again, courageous) stance regarding the revoking of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize, his engagements with prominent postcolonial thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, which brought the study of Ukraine into dialogue with the comparative study of other regions of the world and with the highly influential theoretical paradigms that emanated from those regions… 

But I want to end again on the personal, on the person whose legacy we recognize and celebrate today. So to get very personal: a few months ago, I lost a dear friend to cancer. She was a person about fifteen years older than I am, also a mother of two kids, who I met first through overlapping music scenes in Brooklyn, some twenty years ago. When we met, I was still in graduate school, and she had completed her PhD in Anthropology (focused on Lithuania) here at Columbia, tried her luck on the academic job market, and eventually settled into work as a corporate anthropologist, a career path that allowed her to remain in New York City and raise her family here. I remember vividly the first walk we took together in Prospect Park, right around this turning-of-the-seasons time of year. It was a kind of test to see if our little friendship had promise. And I remember we landed very soon on the topic of Mark–I remember so vividly! As we were passing under an acoustically resonant bridge in the park, right before it clears into the big field at the north end of the park. We figured it out: it turned out Mark had been her mentor too. She spoke of him with such tenderness. It turned out that he had also made her feel seen, made her believe her choice of topic was legitimate and fascinating, had helped her too navigate the unpredictable waters of a PhD in a low-job-opportunity field, had comforted her with his care and his steadiness and his wisdom. 

When I spoke at Mark’s memorial here, on the 15th floor of this same building, in 2020, my friend Corinna came without telling me she was coming, and she had come for Mark; but she had also come for me. We grieved Mark together. I’m carrying her loss now too, and it’s all entangled – the intellectual projects we pursue, the politics of the choice and the argument, and the personal impacts we make. Marko’s impact is still felt keenly on the page, and in the world. I feel so lucky to have known him personally, and to have the model of his courage, his generosity, his warmth, and his ethics to live up to.  Thank you.